


oh, you caught me come to life (the moment that your eyes met mine)

by exhaustedwerewolf



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: AU where whatever marks your skin transfers to your soulmates also, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, Blood, Canonical Character Death, F/M, Forgot to take into account ages but eh it's vague, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Torture, One Shot, Pen Pals, Pre-Relationship, Pre-Stream (Critical Role), Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Vague af but better safe than sorry, Vex'ahlia-centric, Writing on Skin, sorta - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-23
Updated: 2018-04-23
Packaged: 2019-04-26 14:24:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,167
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14404011
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/exhaustedwerewolf/pseuds/exhaustedwerewolf
Summary: In a slightly different universe, Vex'ahlia grows up with a companion in the form of the boy responsible for the ink that spirals up her arms every day.





	oh, you caught me come to life (the moment that your eyes met mine)

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Nate Ruess' 'It Only Gets Much Worse.' Hope you enjoy!

“Mother! Mother!” Vex and Vax call for her together, stumbling through the doorway in their hurry. Elaina looks up from setting the table, her eyes wide with concern at the sound of their panicked voices.

“Did something happen?” She asks, wiping her hands off on her apron, and crouching down as they reach her.

“Look!” Vax urges, as Vex holds out her hands. Her fingers are stained black, and there is a dark spattering on her palms to match. Elaina’s brow furrows in confusion; she reaches out and takes her daughter’s hands.

“You two were playing at the edge of the woods, weren’t you?” She confirms, passing her thumb over the markings, looking puzzled when it comes away clean.

“I couldn’t wash it off in the stream!” Vex explains, even as Vax says;

“It just happened- it isn’t mud or anything, they just went weird suddenly!”

Elaina runs her fingers through her daughter’s hair comfortingly, and hums, lost in thought.

“I think I know what it is.”

“Is she sick?” Vax asks, wide-eyed. “Is it contagious? Is-”

“No, chicken.” Elaina interrupts him, smiling reassuringly in his direction and squeezing Vex’s hand. “There’s no reason to worry.” She turns her attention back to Vex. “You’re very lucky, my darling. This is…” She sighs, almost happily, a faraway look flitting across her face that Vex doesn’t understand. “This is a special gift you’ve been given.”

“A gift?” Asks Vex, brightening, pulling her hands back to curl her fingers this way and that, examining them hopefully. A thought strikes her, and she gasps in delight. “Is it magic?”

“Of a sort.” Elaina laughs, standing again, ruffling her hair as she does so. “The two of you finish setting the table, and I’ll tell you all about it over lunch.”

-

“So,” Vax says, setting down his cutlery with gravitas. “If Vex’s stolemate-”

“ _Soul_ mate.” Elaina corrects, lips quirking in amusement and affection as she reaches over to wipe at his chin.

“Soul-mate,” Vax pronounces carefully, dodging his mother expertly, “if Vex’s soulmate falls over and gets scraped up knees...”

“Then Vex’ahlia will get scratches and scrapes in the same place.” Elaina confirms. “But they won’t hurt, it’ll only look like they do.”

“Who decides who’s her soulmate, though?” Vax asks, frowning. “I thought _we_ were best friends.”

“That’s the magic part.” Elaina looks to Vex. “It could be that you’ll fall in love with your soulmate one day, or it could be that you’ll be very close friends. All it means is that they’ll affect your life in some way. And that isn’t to say-” She continues, as Vax opens his mouth again. “That they’ll be more or less important than anyone else in your life. But they will make a big difference.”

“What about Vax?” Vex asks. “Does he get a soulmate too?”

“It’s possible,” Elaina says, glancing at him. “But soulmates are very rare. Until today, I’d only heard stories. Still,” She reaches over to the water pitcher. “If this person is your soulmate, I’m sure they’ll be very important to Vax too, since you’re so important to each other.” She refills Vex’s cup, the ribbon of water sparkling in the sunlight shining in through the window.

“I wonder who it is…” Vex says, examining her newly cleaned hands- Elaina had explained that her soulmate must’ve finally washed off the ink- as if they might offer a clue. “Thank you, mother.” She adds, taking the cup that had been pushed towards her.

“You’re welcome.” A conspiratorial twinkle appears in Elaina’s eyes. “Would you like to find out?”

Vex splutters on her water, and Vax slams his own cup down.

“Obviously!”

-

In a whirlwind of activity, the table is cleared, and Elaina fetches a small bottle of ink and a blue plumed quill. Vex grips it with an expression of fierce focus, her lip curled, the nib hovering a few inches above her skin. Elaina watches over her, holding Vax’s shoulders, as she hesitates. Finally, Vex tosses the quill down with a frustrated huff.

“What is it?!” Vax explodes.

“I don’t know what to say!” Vex complains. “If this person is so important, I want them to like me!”

“What are you talking about? Just say hello!” Vax replies, exasperated. Elaina chuckles.

“I’m sure they’ll like you, darling. You’re going to be important to them too, after all.” She points out.

Vex nods, considering, and with a deep breath, takes up the quill again. Tongue sticking out in concentration, she traces the letters as best she can- they come out shaky and smudged, writing on skin is harder than she’d thought it’d be- but when she is finished the words are legible, and she sits back, satisfied.

“Well done!” Elaina congratulates her as she tucks the quill behind her ear. “But remember, whoever it is will be just as surprised as you were this morning, if not more so. Don’t be disappointed if it takes them a while to-” She is cut off by the shrill exclamations of the twins, and follows their gazes to where the letters are tracing themselves onto Vex’s hand, a sketchy scrawl appearing just under her message.

_“Hello?”_

-

Over the following days, Vex takes to wearing the quill in her hair so that she is never without it. Elaina often hears the twins whispering excitedly long past their bedtime, catches the glow of candlelight from the gap underneath the door- though it’s always snuffed by the time she looks in on them, though the curl of smoke betrays them. But the twins can never resist spilling all the revelations of the previous night over breakfast.

“-and he livshes in a casthle-” Vex says, through a mouthful of porridge, which she quickly gulps down. “A real castle, with towers and dungeons and everything!”

“And he has six siblings _,_ and two of them are twins like us so he _gets_ twins-” Vax adds, “And he has the longest name _ever made-”_

“Goodness, then how does he remember it?” Elaina says, smiling despite herself, as they both jump to explain, talking over one another.

-

Days become weeks. As summer wanes and autumn is ushered in, with flurries of colourful leaves and mornings of cider-sharp air, the ritual becomes routine. Sometimes two conversations go on at once, Vax writing on Vex’s right arm as she scribbles down the length of her left. They “meet” his parents, send daily “Hello”s to his siblings, delight in the many different hands that respond, comparing cumulus cursive and spidery strokes. Elaina is “introduced,” laughs softly at a joke that comes to her from a stranger, hundreds of miles away, and Vex knows then that she wasn’t lying when she called it magic.

-

So when they’re bundled into a stranger’s carriage, and Vax’s hands are still pressed up against the window, as he cranes his neck to try and watch their mother fade in the distance, it’s the natural thing to do. She untucks the feather from behind her ear, pulls the little bottle of ink from her pocket, and touches the nib to her arm, grasping it hard to write despite the juddering of the ride.

-

 _“I hate it here.”_ She writes, for the thousandth time, letters splotched from the single teardrop she quickly wicked away. Vex has learned, by now, to keep a jug of water on the sill by her bedside- Syldor doesn’t like his perfect daughter to have ink stains on her perfect wrists, her perfect dresses. She wipes the message away, and watching it fade so quickly weakens the catharsis, but when the reply comes;

 _“I know, I’m sorry. Come to Whitestone,”_ and disappears just as quickly, she smiles to herself, picturing a pitcher on a sill of white stone, an ocean away.

_“You’re human. He’ll never send me to you.”_

_“Then let me come get you.”_

Vex glances over to the sleeping form of her brother, curled in on himself, the dusky light coming in through the window casting his uneasy face in lilac and amber shadows. She swallows the painful lump in her throat.

_“Maybe soon.”_

-

The day they decide to leave, the day Syldor crosses the line, he is with them. His words, rushed and untidy with concern, bloom quickly and darkly along Vex’s arms, alongside the blossoming bruises.

-

And when they find the rubble, well, there is no-one else to tell. Vax cries himself to sleep that night, keeps sobbing out in his dreams. Vex’s vision is blurred with tears, but still she writes to him, tries to explain what it feels like, this new searing agony in every nerve, breath, thought. Tries to explain how her heart has been turned to ash, will crumble at the slightest breeze. He makes little dashes to show that he is still with her until exhaustion takes Vex too.

When she awakes, long before dawn, gasping fearfully, fingers outstretched as if to grab for someone’s hand, an offer awaits her.

_“Please, I can’t stand to think of the two of you alone. You have a home here if you want it.”_

But they did not find a body, she tells him, and they have to keep looking.

(They just broke out of one gilded cage, and they aren’t about to get trapped in another.)

-

Vex keeps learning.

She learns what it means to be tired, cold, lost, afraid, until that ache becomes constant, becomes background noise.

Vex learns that ink is expensive, and that is one more kindness she never recognised, one more thing she will never get to thank her mother for.

Everyday, ink or none, a _“Good morning,”_ awaits her, in finer script every time, and a _“Good night,”_ comes in the evening, sometimes so late she finds herself squinting in the darkness, unsure if it’s really there. She seeks out dappled moonlight glowing through the canopy, or she lights a candle, and she learns one more thing- it always is. And when she convinces herself they can afford it, the coin, or the risk of Vax being caught by the wrist, she replies. They talk about nothing and everything. She worries to him-

 _“Heart on my sleeve,”_ she writes, jokingly, and he replies,

_“It sounds silly, to write it, but I laughed at that. I wish you could’ve just heard me.”_

She frets over the snaking markings Vax comes home with branded into his skin, over infection, literal and figurative, over feeding themselves, over feeding Trinket, over sickness, over the coming snows.

 _“Tell me something nice.”_ She writes when she is exhausted with worry, and he replies with a story about Julius spilling wine on his date, about his inventions, about the way the library curtains are wafting in the breeze at this very moment.

 _“Come to Whitestone.”_ He says again.

 _“Soon, maybe,”_ She says again, scratching Trinket behind the ears with her free hand, listening to his appreciative lowing. _“If we can find a way to get there.”_

_“I’ll come to you.”_

But she will not owe him- the dream of a Lord from a castle rescuing her was snuffed out long ago. She will not disappoint him. She will not be disappointed by him.

 _“Soon, maybe.”_ She writes, again, again, again...

-

It’s a celebration, and that makes it hurt all the more. With Trinket safe in the forest, the twins are out of the snow. It’s pure luxury; a roof over their heads, a bed- a _fireplace,_ they bask in it, Vex closing her eyes to savour the heat on her face.

She is shrugging out of her clothes when Vax gasps- a choked, shocked sound like he’s been hit hard and sudden, and she spins in alarm, clutching her shirt to her chest, but he’s just standing there, staring at her.

“Vax, you gave me a heart attack!” She complains. “What, what is it?”

He points past her, at the small mirror on the dressing table, and she shoots a glance back over her shoulder and- Gods- _all down her back_ \- in the reflection her skin is stained red with more blood than she’s ever seen- she feels her throat closing up, nausea surging through her-

-

She can hardly go out looking like this, black-eyed, burn-marked, thin red lines running from the corners of her mouth. (She almost wishes she could taste the blood, feel the blows, can’t explain that wish to Vax, so she lets it sit heavy in her chest as she gazes blankly for hours at the patterns of frost on the window.) So she stays inside for the next fortnight. Vax brings food, words of comfort, and ink, endless bottles of ink, and she scrawls on every inch of skin that isn’t painted with gore.

_“What happened?”_

_“Where are you?”_

_“Please just tell me you’re okay.”_

_“Write to me as soon as you can.”_

_“Are you okay?”_

_“Please. Please. Please.”_

They plan, or try to. Vax obtains a map and they discover they are weeks travel from Whitestone. Vex cannot say for certain if he is still there, can’t feel him- feels his absence like an organ she never knew she had has been carved out of her. Sometimes she is furious, sometimes she cannot stop crying, but mostly she lies in bed, eyes on the sliver of dove down sky she can see from her resting place, watching the white flakes drifting.

And then one morning, she awakes to snow-silence; Vax already gone from their room, no voices in the street, no whispering breeze. She feels dread coursing through her, sure as the blood in her veins. When she rises, she sees the white sheets fall away from her in the small mirror, and her skin is just as blank.

Like a bird bursting from the undergrowth- sheets rustling, shattering a bottle of ink that had been adrift in the billowing blankets, she claws her way to the dressing table.

_“What happened? Were you rescued? Please tell me you’re okay.”_

She waits.

And nothing comes back.

She thinks of bodies being carefully cleaned for open caskets.

-

Every morning, as soon as she wakes, still half-asleep, she feels for her quill, scribbles;

 _“Good morning,”_ and every morning, she waits, and waits, stares for as long as she can- if she can just concentrate just a little longer, she tells herself, _he’s sure to-_ the words will appear, she just knows it. Every morning, a new icy tendril winds its way around her heart when she gives up, and every evening, she can’t close her eyes without leaving a;

“ _Good night.”_

Every evening, that is, until it’s another bottle of ink (ink black as dragonscale, as opium, sparkling in the firelight and in her fitful dreams like liquid obsidian) or medicine for Vax, rain-soaked, feverish, shivering from whatever the Clasp had him doing the night before.

“It’s fine.” He struggles to speak past the chatter in his teeth, and it’s so obviously _not,_ that she feels tears burning behind her eyes at the unfairness of it all, and wills the anger to swell in their place. “I’m not sick.” He folds his arms, clenching his fingers to hide the shuddering.

 

For the first time, Vex doesn’t say _“Good night.”_

-

Letters to a dead boy, she thinks, every time she seeks out a quiet clearing with Trinket, settles herself on a mossy log. A girl, sitting alone in the woods, writing messages on her own skin because she doesn’t have any friends-

Trinket noses at her hand, snuffling comfortingly, and she takes a steadying breath.

And she tells him that yesterday Trinket sneezed so hard, standing in a patch of wildflowers, that he fell over backwards. She tells him about the magic that nature itself has blessed her with, and how she hates it sometimes, because it can’t _do_ anything _,_ can’t regrow any of what has withered under her touch. She tells him how she misses her mother so much sometimes she doesn’t see the point in living if there’s no home for them to fight their way back to any longer.

She tells him she misses him, too, the boy she never met. Misses him and his siblings, his inventions, the breeze rippling the curtains in the library that she still imagines when she is too tired to keep her eyes open.

-

There’s the way her throat burns, of course, when she finds a nick on her arm she doesn’t recognise, can’t remember bruising her knees, what looks like a rope burn across her palm. But there’s no time to linger on wishful thinking, so she lets her hands drop to her sides and breaks into a run to catch up with Vax and Trinket, her footfalls light on the forest floor.

-

And then there is Keyleth, Grog, Scanlan, Tiberius, Pike, in all their motley glory.

She laughs so hard one evening, at something Scanlan was doing that involved high-kicks down the length of the bar and a song sung at the top of his lungs, that that night, messages spiralling around her arms do not cross her mind. She only struggles to suppress her chuckles when her mind strays back to Pike’s snorting giggles, Grog’s roar of laughter, only basks in the pleasant ache of her ribs.

The ink remains on her dresser, untouched.

-

It’s just for a heartbeat- Vex flexes her fingers, spies a bruise on the back of her hand, distinctly shaped, like a “V,” or maybe an arrowhead-

“You look terrible.” Pike breathes, laying her palms against her stomach, distracting her.

“I feel fine.” Vex retorts, even as the invigorating energy surges through her. She almost catches a glimpse, the sunlight caught in the water pouring from the pitcher, before Pike pulls away from her. The cleric’s expression twists into a frown, she opens her mouth to say something-

But then a distant slam sets them all off, (their synergy is wild and perfect as a pack of wolves by now,) and they are running between cells, breezing down corridors and crashing through doors, and the adrenaline has turned her very soul into some untamed creature, fleet-footed and windswept.

If it hadn't been for the shock of white at the corner of her vision, she would have blazed right past, but she doesn’t, she glances- sees a figure, ghost-pale and skeletal, makes out that he is breathing-

She puts up her hand and the others slow with her, and follow her gaze. Pike summons light, raises her symbol like a torch for them to better make the prisoner out.

“Ah shit,” says Grog, a whisper by his standards. “No-one else was s’pposed to be in here.”

“It’s fine,” Tiberius reasons, motioning for the group to go on. “He’s too out of it to remember seeing us-”

The chains jangle as he lifts his gaze, and by the light of Pike’s holy symbol, she sees his hand, strained against the manacle.

Adorned with the same, arrowhead bruise.

Her eyes meet his. Her voice is raw as a fresh wound, barely above a whisper.

“Percival?”

“Vex?”


End file.
